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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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What the heck is your definition of healthy????? Do you just think that being "trendy" means it's better in health and taste?

It's always strange when I meet people like this. Theres a certain kind of person that fixates on a particular diet and reasons about how healthy food is by how closely it follows their chosen diet. It's hard for me to get into the head of people who are just completely immune to any actual examination of the outcomes of various diets and insists their diet is healthy. Someone downthread points out OPs supposedly healthier national diets have significantly worse outcomes than the supposedly unhealthy japanese diet and OP basically ignores it. I do know people like this IRL but they're all boomers probably basing their ideas off a debunked paper that was widely reported in the 70s or something. People have some utterly bizarre ideas about what food is healthy and I don't understand why theres so much intransience on this particular topic.

Same reason there’s a lot of intransigence on politics and religion: it’s a moral issue. It’s also closely linked to questions of willpower and akrasia for a lot of people, which is a particularly touchy subject. “The only reason you want to promote food X is because it aligns with your sinful and gluttonous lifestyle. I on the other hand am able to control my baser impulses, which is why I walk the path of true righteousness and eat food Y.”